Many data centers in use today employ a cloud computing paradigm. As is well known, the cloud computing paradigm is a model that provides ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services), as part of a cloud infrastructure, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (see, e.g., NIST Special Publication No. 800-145).
Application deployment on such a cloud infrastructure has been substantially automated by the development and implementation of tools that employ a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) approach. One example of such a PaaS approach is implemented in the CloudFoundry® product available from Pivotal Software, Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), which provides application developers with the functionality of a versatile PaaS application deployment layer. One of the main benefits of the PaaS application deployment layer is that, by controlling deployment of an application to a specific platform (e.g., specific data center or cloud), the PaaS application layer abstracts the application developer away from the specific hardware architecture of the data center/cloud where the application is intended to be deployed. This increases development speed and also facilitates speed of deployment for information technology (IT) operators.